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| Terry Mattingly |
In an article published by The Elkhart Truth, Terry Mattingly, director of the Journalism
Center for the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities in Washington,
D.C., and Baylor graduate, is bringing forward the concept of the “secular”
Catholic – a proposed entity not unlike that of the ethnic Mennonite that has been brought forward by secular
Russländer Mennonites of the Canadian persuasion (including the Brüderthaler).
Mattingly quotes Fordham’s Tom Beaudoin
in defining secular Catholics as, “’…
people who were baptized as Catholics, but they find it impossible to make
Catholicism the center of (their) lives, by which I mean Catholicism as defined
by the official teachings of the church’ … [f]or these believers, there are
‘things that they learned about faith from Catholicism. Then there are things they learned from their
jobs, from school experiences, from their music and from their favorite movies.
… They are hybrid believers and their faith comes from all over the place,’”
(Mattingly, ibid).
Culturally, this is an interesting idea, not in its novelty – cultural
Mennonites have been defining themselves out of a spiritual self-identity since
the early 1960s – but rather in its reflection on “identity.”
